Teachout House

169 North Pleasant,
1867

Brick mason Marvin Teachout, who arrived in
Oberlin during the Civil War, brought a touch of urban
cosmopolitanism to the village when he built this red brick mansard
house in 1867. The mansard style was imported from France just before
the war and swept the country in the postwar decade. Its elegance,
order, and bulk appealed to a nation tired of war and eager for the
ornaments of peace and prosperity. The fashion was especially popular
in urban America, where cramped land space gave value to the extra
attic rooms tucked under the steep pitch of the mansard roof. The
mansard craze of the 1960s, widely favored among condominium and
commercial strip developers, rolled through just a century after the
first wave.

The Teachout family lived in this house
until 1904. Renovated in 1963 by contractor Kenny Clark with advice
from architect William B. Durand, it is the older of two surviving
nineteenth-century brick mansard homes in Oberlin.